"Today, I Took a Nap and Dreamt Saleem Was Here"

Not yet ripe, not yet red. We wait in the shade, wrapped in green. Becoming.

🍇 August 20, 2025 — Peekskill, NY
Today, I took a nap and dreamt Saleem was here. Not in passing. Not as memory. He was here—with the weight and warmth of someone who never left.

The room was unfamiliar, yet I knew it. Somewhere between South Carolina and California or here, but the geography bent around us like soft light.

He moved through the space like he belonged to it. Lifted the golden blanket from the bed, wrapped it around his shoulders. Said nothing. Everything between us was understood.

He left for the bathroom. 

Then I heard Uncle Gunter’s low voice echoed just beyond the door: “Be careful. Watch for ICE.” My heart stuttered, and I slipped into the bathroom to hide, convinced Saleem would follow.

He did. Bare feet padding across cold tile, he joined me in that small, echoing chamber. Uncle Gunter stepped in behind him, mop in hand, No preachy words. No judgement. Just the sound of water and cloth. A kind of cleansing. A sigh of something unsaid.
​
Then I left.

​Uncle Gunter followed, carrying bags of grapes. Big, juicy, dark purple grapes. They spilled slightly as he walked, like offerings, like abundance, like memory.

He tasted one. Said they were sweet. I believed him.

The apartment filled with flowers. For my mother. She had died again, in this dream. But it wasn’t grief—it was reverence.

Women appeared in black dresses with long black sleeves, buns of hair twisted in back of their head. I thought the woman was Aunt Lue the way her eyes looked at me. Lois and Uncle Gunter reminded me that Aunt Lue had passed for many years. That same woman twisted into the face of Willie Mae, another cousin, she too passed on. Then Lois who wasn't a cousin. All gone, save Lois, not passed on, in a white dress thrumming a bass guitar— a low, steady rhythm that held the room together. Her father was a twin—Harry and Larry— nephews of Uncle Gunter, and once part of a group called The Gospel Trumpets.

All of them, Uncle and the twins,  the two mothers,  now gone.

They spoke of Uncle Gunter’s two mothers. One had been cruel. I remembered. I understood his story like my own that had been a long thorn in my side. Not out of resentment. Just circumstance. The way it was, the way it is.

I found Saleem again. Pulled him from the bathroom. We left together.
​
Then I woke up.